HEARTS

Essays

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“Silence is all we dread.
There’s Ransom in a Voice –
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face.”
(Emily Dickinson, 1873)

Before setting out on the journey that would inspire ‘a book in passings,’ I spent four months living in Spain, isolated in a small town with hardly anyone I could communicate with. I was working as a language assistant in the local primary school and trying to learn Spanish on the go. But the audiobooks and language-learning apps I’d been using weren’t much help. Most people didn’t speak the sort of Spanish I was learning, but rather the Valcenian dialect, and so even the the few phrases I was picking up were mostly irrelevant. When I tried to converse with someone I’d annoy them with my inability and when they’d have to digress into English to communicate something simple for me I’d feel guilty. At some point it became easier to not try and speak with anyone at all. 

A bridge between me and society had collapsed. I couldn’t ask, answer or simply converse with someone at the grocery store. And it made me feel dumb. But without being able to use words to express myself or understand others, I quickly became aware of another language with which I could—a universal language everybody speaks with, no matter the language native to them. Immersing myself into my body, I begun to explore how I could translate my questions and thoughts through non-verbal communications. Soon much of my day became about looking for the small jerk of an eyebrow or the twist of a mouth. I relied on reading body language and gleaning whatever I could through the subtle expressions in someone’s eyes. As I practiced this, my encounters became about understanding people intuitively, rather than logically deciphering the messages they were telling me with their words. It was still isolating, but anyone who has been in a similar situation would understand the sorts of deep connections that can be made without any words being shared at all.

There were three people I could talk with in town. The first was the English teacher at the school, who I was assisting. He spoke fluent English and when there was a gap between our classes we’d sneak out of the school to smoke cigarettes and talk about guitars.

Another was the Pakistani boy who worked in the kebab store under the house I rented. After work, when walking back from the school, he would call me in and hand me some loose coins. “Could you order a tea please?” He’d ask me. Everyday I would do it, carrying his loose coins across the plaza to the cafe. But somehow I could never make it to his liking. First it was no milk, then too much. He told me there’s not enough sugar, not enough sugar, too much sugar. Too hot, too cold, can you ask them to make it hotter again?

Everyday I’d try and make the tea exactly as he wanted and everyday I’d fail. But I didn’t mind how particular he was. I pitied him. He worked much harder than me, earned far less and wasn’t even afforded a small break to go across the plaza and ask for the tea to be made himself. The more I failed the more determined I became to make the perfect tea for him. I imagined the perfect tea and him sipping it and feeling, as it slipped down his parched throat, a great untying and uplifting in his stomach. I imagined the magnificent relief the perfect tea would bring him, carrying him up, beyond the monotony of turning cones of meat and the feeling of grease coating his body, up and into some harmonious sphere stirring with fragrant steam to which he truly belonged but had beforehand only dreamed of. But as the days stretched to weeks and then months and I still failed to bring him a tea he was satisfied with, I became fearful he losing faith in my ability. I felt him becoming fed up with me, but I didn’t want to lose contact with this unique English-speaking person in town. Carrying his loose coins across the plaza I would feel how light they were in my palm—almost weightless—and hoped that this next tea would be the perfect one.

Eventually the Pakistani boy who worked in the kebab store stopped asking me to make his tea. He refused when I offered. At first I thought he finally lost faith in my ability. Then I started to realise the arrogance of my fantasy: that I could relieve him from his work. I wondered if it was my arrogance which made him push me away and not my failure to make the perfect tea. But eventually I discovered the real reason. After stopping by after work I once again offered my tea-making services. I saw his eyes dart around nervously, finally glancing over to his co-worker who sat behind the glass cabinet of lettuce and tomato and tabouli. The co-worker was smirking first at him and then at me and making a gesture in front of his crotch as if he were wanking. The co-worker burst out laughing and the Pakistani boy told me to go away.

After this I fantasised all the more of making him the perfect tea and relieving him from his work environment. But I never did and never got the chance again: my friendship, I realised, had become another of his burdens.

My neighbour was the other person I’d occasionally speak with. Sometimes we’d smoke a joint together. He was a construction worker and although he worked very hard, his life seemed curtailed by poverty. His house had no functioning lights, but once he took me inside and with his phone-torch showed me how he’d covered half the walls in mosaics. Colourful tiles arranged in pyramids and pharaoh heads crawled up the plaster of his walls in the dim light. He had a strange, unexplained fascination with ancient Egypt. Whenever I saw him he told me he was tired and to describe his day he’d beat his fist into the palm of his other hand, a furious expression on his face. He didn’t speak English but that didn’t stop us from talking. After a few beers and a joint we’d chat freely, him speaking Valcenian, me speaking English, neither of us understanding a word and it not mattering at all. I think he was a very lonely man. I taught his niece and one day, when walking home with her, he came out to greet us and she ran away from him.

We found in each other an unusual companionship and understanding that let us stave of the plague of loneliness and fulfil, however inadequately, the need for human interaction. Even though we didn’t understand a word the other spoke, it was with this man that I shared my deepest connection with in that town. It was raining one evening and we were standing under the cover above our doorsteps and smoking. We were chatting uselessly and watching the rain flow into rapid streams down the road gutters. Our houses were staggered on a steep hill and so the water rushed by very quickly. He was trying to communicate something. He’d searched for an English word but couldn’t find one. Turning to me, he started to dictate through hand gestures; but it was some drunken, stoned sign language that I couldn’t translate. Eventually he threw up his hands and became silent, letting the point go. I watched him silently, seething in his loneliness—and me in mine. A shadow had fallen over his face and his mouth was turned in a sour grimace. The rain continued to pour. I started to listen to it. Soon I noticed he was listening too and that a beautiful silence was forming between us. He no longer looked upset. His eyes, which were the same turquoise of the Mediterranean Sea, stirred gently as he watched the rain. I felt calm and that somehow both of us were experiencing the same sense of nostalgia and sadness with the rain falling and rushing by on the street. The rush formed a sort of white noise that was indistinguishable from silence. And so, despite the pouring rain and rushing water, there was a sense of stillness (although, perhaps timelessness is a better word).  As the rush of white noise continued the sense of silence grew. I’m sure we could both feel it anointing itself. We stood very still, aware that we now possessed a place within something beautiful. We looked at each other and tried not to laugh, for we were both surprised by this amazing silence. An idea came to me and I rose my finger to him, signalling soundlessly, I’ll be back in a minute. I dipped into my house and returned with two sheets of paper. We still didn’t speak. He looked at me with a questioning twist in his mouth. I showed him how to fold the paper up into a kind of boat. His calloused fingers turned and creased the paper, following how mine had done. And when we were ready, we stepped out into the rain and held our boats to the flowing water of the road gutters.

He called in a loud and rough voice, “Un, dos, tres!” And we let them go. Immediately they soaked through and caved in upon themselves, the water’s rush swallowing them and sweeping them away. And we laughed and smiled at each other like children. The water’s rush taking our ships out of view, round the twist in the street.

 

Silence: that is
my word’s meaning’s meaning.
Silence, it is you
I try and speak and fail.

 

I write all of this because I believe this time was significant in shaping ‘a book in passings.’ It was in these silent months, and in these small but significant interactions, that the language of ‘a book in passings’  took shape. For the greater part of these months everything that could be said remained untold, remained inside, fermenting in my unconsciousness. In the few interactions I had—with the English teacher, the Pakistani boy and my neighbour—I learned of the presence of silence, particularly in communication, and how so much of what is shared is said in that time when no one is speaking.

As I arrived in Barcelona I opened a new journal and as soon as I saw it’s open lines I started to write. When I started to write I forgot everything I’d learned about silence and about communication in those isolated months. When I started to write everything begun pouring out of me. I felt I had to write everything. And so as I gave myself more and more to this notebook and my pen, I became like those paper ships my neighbour and I cast down the flooding streets of our quiet village. I drowned and was carried away in the rush of words.

Usually it’s my habit to leave the first few pages of a new notebook untouched. They get filled eventually, but when I first start writing in them I prefer to leave them blank. There is a sense of security in it for me. It tells me, this is not the beginning, that wasn’t the end, your life bleeds, the book doesn’t shape you. The beginning of the diary which became ‘a book in passings’ was unique in that I didn’t do that; that I wrote on the very first page.

In retrospect I imagine it like this: unable able to communicate with people for those few months, I felt a bridge between me and society had collapsed, and that a river had come to flow between me and everyone else, so that when I started to write in my journal I wrote with the delusional fervour that my words could replace the fallen bridge and rejoin me into the world—only all I was doing was feeding the river, making it wider and flow more rapidly: I was recreating the white noise of the rain and the flowing water. Reading back on the original diary I can sense a self-consciousness about this failure, but I must of considered myself too far devoted to the diary to stop, or found in my separation some opportunity to lose myself, and some hope in being lost. Either way I continued to feed that river with my words and broaden the gulf.   

In the thick of it, the experience of writing the original diary was actually somewhat like performing noise music. Instead of trying to formulate ideas or cultivate anything, my pencil moved spasmodically. Just how a noise musician grabs at knobs, twists them, presses buttons and pulls at levers, so too did my pencil play with things from my brain. It took to my imagination with seizure-like movements. No breath was spared to admire a sentence or idea, just how no noise musician spares a breath to enjoy a melody or rhythm. Rather, there was only a relishing in the obliteration of such things.

 

There is noise,
so much noise,
I can almost imagine silence.

 

What readers will find in this book is a random collection of observations, thoughts, dreams and encounters from my journey, experiences which somehow found a mirror image in me, and which later came to resonant with an Other through me, so as to grow and transform into the sights and dreams of that person, no longer my own. The images of distant mountains, the sound of my feet crunching the gravel of the road. There was a divorce between what I was experiencing and what I was writing in my diary. Or, more accurately, how I was experiencing and how I was translating that into words. I couldn’t understand it. Why was I creating myself into a story? And why did that story read like it was been lived by someone other than me? But becoming self-conscious of it didn’t stop this from happening. Rather it only made the whole thing more strange and inescapable. I wrote things which collaborated to intoxicate me with an unreality. And it was from this narcotic world and its cyclone of images that I loyally took accounts.

I view the narrator of ‘a book in passings’ as a thief of my memories. Somehow he had executed a coup over me and taken possession of my journey while I was living it. He was forcing me to write him into existence. And proportionally, I was writing myself out of it. I couldn’t help but listen: he was talking in an endless babble, raving about everything he could tear out of my mind, everything that I could think of, only it was him that was thinking.

The diary was written with this bizarre duality I hadn’t experienced before. There was me writing it and there was ‘I’ as I wrote me. Both of us were perceiving the world. Helen Garner, in her 2002 essay, ‘I,’ says the personas in her work don’t form through something like an invention, nor like a choosing, but rather through a “crystallisation of the persona” which happens organically and is shaped by the demands of the story. Similarly, the narrator that can be discovered in ‘a book in passings’ is not me, but rather the “me” which  crystallised as I wrote, as I walked, as I woke in my sleeping bag incased in ice.

I felt this duality of experience while I was writing the original diary, but it wasn’t until a few months after my return to Australia, when I re-read the diary, that I realised the extent to which the thief of my memories had robbed me. I read it and didn’t recognise myself. I couldn’t recognise my memories in my own account. The thief had taken over the whole thing.

There are moments of obvious battle, where we fought each other for ownership of the story.  But re-reading it after the whole trip was done and the battles were all over, I found myself curious of this stranger who pervaded my diary. Perhaps it was just obvious then that he had got the better of me, he had won the war and there was no way of wrangling him out, for he had made of my diary a tangling mangrove of incoherent sentences and foreign dictations. Maybe I should have known something was wrong in the first moment I started writing: I didn’t leave the pages blank, I didn’t give the diary space to tell me “the book doesn’t shape you.”

 

Uproarious is the Thief of Memory,
in the shadow of your light he makes
and dictates himself without you,
“The book is me.”

 

Realising this was a difficult thing to deal with emotionally. What was I supposed to do with this other person’s diary? Where was my story? And who even was this person?

The only way forward I could see was to re-write the diary, only not as my own, but as his. I had to go back and take myself out of it, while simultaneously implant him in my stead. It was a process I became deeply anxious about after reading the book ‘Beauty and Sadness’ (1961) by Yasunari Kawabata. I’d stumbled over this novel by chance in an op shop and found it to be the most significant thing I’d ever read in relation to my writing practice. The tale is a dark exploration of how writing about oneself or others close to oneself can wrought life-long cages for those who you write about to exist in, and how those stories, even if branded as fiction, may become more real than anything else for those people. My fear became that even if I re-wrote the diary as the diary of the Thief of my Memory it would still read to someone else as my own diary. My friends and family would find me, as the the author of the original diary, indistinguishable from the narrator of ‘a book in passings.’ 

Perhaps I have made a cage for myself after all. I only hope it is a cage I can yet escape from.

My approach became guided by this anxiety, as well as the understanding that obviously you cannot control what someone takes from a story or how they perceive you. I guess I should say then that it became about making sure my own sense of self would be free from the text.

Taking a lesson from Kawabata, I realised this new story could not seek to claim reality, much like a diary does. I had to find a way to complicate the form and express through its own telling the falsity of its nature.

My approach came to lean on the ethics of Brutalist architecture, as I was learning about it at the time: to exhibit the stories constructed nature, to make the reader bear witness to it’s raw materials, and have the entire story resolve into one visually conceivable image. The construction of the stories framing narrative was one of the key things I realised would help me accomplish this. Echoing my own questions about what to do with this diary in which I couldn’t recognise myself, I fabricated the story of a nameless author abandoning their diary to an open-ended fate, and then someone finding it and wrestling with the ideas about what to do with it. Through this I felt I could open the reading of ‘a book passings’ with a clear colour of fiction, one in which every word written thereafter must relate within. If there is one clear image I want the reader to see when reading this book it is that sentence scribbled on the opening page of the abandoned diary, “make of it what you will.” It serves both as the beginning and the end of this story.

The inclusion of photographs became another way in which I could reveal the manufactured nature of this story. I felt their inclusion would penetrate the sense of autobiography inspired by the diary form and bring a reminder of unreality. My hope is that they may serve as moments for both physical and mental silence to echo in the reader. They break the flow of words and speak in another silent language. I hope it can remind the reader that what they are reading is not real, that something once existed here which was real but what they are getting has been meddled with, has become artifice. I hope the images breathe a silence which says “reality lies beyond and is unaccessible through this page.” I hope it tells my friends and family that this is not me, but someone who is unreal.

In a similar way, but perhaps less intuitively, I hoped that by maintaining the sense of a diary I could also dispel the illusion of autobiography. In the brutalist architecture style there is a term called ‘le béton brut,’ meaning “raw concrete.” It is often utilised on the walls of buildings to give an unfinished look which reveal the builders marks on the walls and leave the frame of the building exposed. In my construction of this book I was hoping to leave a finish of “raw diary.” Rather than make it all clean and seamless, I wanted to perpetuate the myth of a dairy so that I may break it and reveal through its fracturing how I have imagined someone else in my stead.

 

“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence”
(Luis Borges, n/a)

 

Although I said I wanted the story to unite into one visually conceivable image, as is aimed for in Brutalist architecture, I also wanted that image to be open and insecure and asymmetrical.

This is something I again learned through reading Kawabata. It is the asymmetrical image which speaks of boundlessness and invites silence. I didn’t want the book to be easily divisible by two—not formally, chronologically, methodically or meaningfully. I didn’t want the story to sit in the harmony of perfect balance, but realised the story must find it’s balance through precarious swinging—for precarious is the nature of the stories narrator; and collapse is always possible.

This became the most difficult thing about writing the book. How could I create this asymmetry while also understanding what Kawabata says, that the asymmetry must always rest upon “a balance imposed.”  I struggled with this for a long time, having no idea about how this abstract conceptualisation of language could actually be expressed in language. It wasn’t until reading Bashō, the legendary haiku poet (put on to me through Kawabata), that I started to learn about how this balance may exist in language and in the story I was writing. Nobuyuki Yuasa, in the introduction to my copy of ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches’ (Bashō, 1966), describes the poets ability to balance prose and haiku, so that they “illuminate each other like mirrors held up facing each other” (p39).

I thought of my own story and what elements we’re present and how they interacted with each other. What I had to do, to achieve both this sense of asymmetry and balance, was to firstly accept the precarious swinging which was my stories balance and make that more coherent and prevalent on multiple scales. I begun considering how the streams of consciousness and incoherency could fold back upon itself through reflectiveness, how longer paragraphs could balance with short sentences, how variations on themes could meet with tangents and how the present tense balanced itself with the past and future of the story.

I am only learning to write, but my aim has been to make all the incoherencies and coherencies of this story understandable through the existence of its opposite.

Another inspiration that helped me discover the nature of the story I had to tell in ‘a book in passings’ was ‘The Waves’ (1931), by Virginia Woolf. In this amazing book I discovered a new way of story-telling; that being through rhythm rather than primarily focussing on plot. The plot of ‘a book in passings’ is fairly straightforward, although it’s linearity is complicated by the framing narrative. But in contrast to this, or rather, as a balancing weight to this, I sought to use the rhythms of language to bring the reader deeper into the narrator’s world and experiences. The original writing of the diary was involved in a variety of different forms of movement: walking, hitchhiking, catching trains, ferries and buses. And each form of movement correlated with a unique rhythm of language. I begun to wonder how each of these different ways of moving through the world could reflect in language the narrator’s internal journey. This process became complicated when I realised the way I was moving through the world as I edited this book was also having an influence. I felt things were becoming like a great swish-swash; like water when two different flows meet. 

After returning from Europe I moved from my parents home in Queensland back to Melbourne. I bought a second-hand car and drove down the coast with my friend, all our belongings stuffed in the back. For a few months I slept in a swag on the floor, sharing a room with my friend in a share-house in Thornbury. I restarted university, made new friends and finally moved house across the city to Moonee Ponds.

All of these things I felt to be influential to me. They affected me and moved me, both physically and emotionally. I was re-writing the diary in a time of great personal change and realised that this too couldn’t be excluded from the story.

Perhaps things got a bit messy and the book would have been more coherent if it were re-written in a time of stability. But because it couldn’t be changed, I decided to lean into it.

 

As mirrors
of silence,
as something irreconcilable,
and full of movement:
what have I given the Thief?

 

George Saunders, the accomplished writer and teacher, declares in ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain’ (2021), that anything incorporated into a story will, by its very presence, do some work for that story. I agree with this and feel my process of writing ‘a book in passings’ could be narrowed down to exploring this strange and magical truth. I include things from my original diary which disrupt the concept of the fiction story, a concept I imprison the story within through the framing narrative and through the photographs. These inclusions problematise the coherency. By doing so, I have hoped to draw the readers attention to how random inclusions and absurdities develop the story despite their randomness and absurdity. In creating these moments of incoherency I’ve attempted to force the readers mind into a sort of self-awareness, so that they may observe how stories relate, complicate, and escape the reality of human life.

George Saunders also writes, “when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself” (2021, p27). For this reason, I would argue that ‘a book in passings’ is not a good story. Instead of being alert to the story being told, my story is often wrestled away to become alert of its own telling. As I edited the story I accepted that this was an irreconcilable quality of my book.

Instead of finding this disheartening, I found it liberating. This, after all, was only one story; I can write more. In drawing a conclusion I needn’t feel myself to be bound to any one thing; I could simply do what I felt would be right for this sort of story.

At this point, with the deadline rushing towards me, I joined a drug trial to raise funds for the publication. For two-weeks I lived in a medical facility in South Melbourne. The experience was similar to living in a hostel, that’s also an airport. And big pharmaceutical companies are pulling unfathomable amounts of blood out your arm, collecting your piss and sticking needles in your spine. 

Most of the day I had to lie down, but in the early hours and in the nights I could write. The most horrendous anxiety about this story possessed me in this time and I wrote furiously, from start to finish again the story. I would lie awake torturing myself with doubts about wether or not this story needed to be published. Perhaps, I thought, it is too close to me. I thought of ‘Beauty and Sadness’ (1961) and questioned if I’d learned anything from reading it at all. People had already pre-ordered copies and it all felt too late; there was nothing I could do but keep writing and keep fighting the urge to change everything. 

I thought again of my neighbour in Spain and that night when we pushed paper ships down the flooding street. I thought of the sense of silence that grew out of the sound of the rain and water flowing. As I drew a conclusion in the book, I realised the story thus far was very much like white noise, and not very much like a story. It was the rain and the rushing water, but not yet the sense of silence. I felt that perhaps it would be impossible to emulate that silence within it. Perhaps its not even my place to do so. Either way, it definitely wasn’t within my skill level.

My goal then became to bring the book into an “unspoken conclusion”—a term at times used to describe the experience of finishing one of Bashō’s haiku’s. The best way I could accomplish this was to make the end allude back to the framing narrative—an allusion with no documentation, and of which the reader is forced to make something. I hoped this unspoken ending would force the reader into doing the job I was unable to do: write all of this nonsense into a story. I hoped to ask them to make of it what they will.

In this time I also finalised the design of the book. The more square shape took me days to decide on. I hoped it’s design would somewhat resemble a brick, and by doing so I’d be paying homage to the architectural influence of the Brutalist movement which shaped the contents. Another particularity I decided to incorporate in the design was the absence of page and chapter numbers. Without these numerical place-points in the reading of the book, I hoped to extend the theme of Time in the story out of it, and into the reader’s experience. There aren’t dates or chapter titles, nor are there page numbers to ground you in while reading ‘a book in passings,‘ and so you must relate where you are in it’s reading to where the narrator is in their journey. There’s no option to flick ahead and count how many pages you have left to read; there’s no telling when it will end, besides how you intuitively relate to the thickness of the book and to the sense of the story’s progression. 

As I finalised these design choices, usually late at night, under the big squares of LED lights in the medical facility, I became aware of parallels my current situation shared with the one in which I was writing about. Both were transient times in liminal worlds. 

It wasn’t till I was free from the facility, and I could feel wind again, and smell late-spring in the city, that I relaxed and looked at all the work I’d done with a surprising indifference. I felt similarly to how I did when I first read my original diary and discovered in it this unrecognisable person. But feeling it here was a comfort. When I felt this, I knew I’d be okay with sharing the book. It no longer belonged to me, I was free from it. 

 

 

 

 

References:

Bashō (1966), The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin Classics, Great Britain

Borges, L (n/a)

Dickinson, E (c.1873), The Complete Poems by Emily Dickinson (n.p)

Garner, H (2002), I, Meanjin, Australia

Saunders, G (2021), A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Random House, USA

Kawabata, K (1961), Beauty and Sadness, Translated by Howard Hibbett, Penguin, Great Britain

Woolf, V (1931), The Waves, Hogarth Press, Great Britain